Adwords when used to its potential is so much more than simply an ongoing promotional method that you just leave quietly running on autopilot in the background. Yet that’s exactly what the vast majority of Adwords advertisers do, same keywords, same ad copy, and same landing pages month after month. And of course, you get the same (or more likely steadily worsening) results.

Reaching your goals

Once your Adwords campaigns become a living, breathing part of your business, this will help you achieve the goals that that you’ve set for the year.

So how to do this? Simple, let’s break it down.

First, think seasonality

When are your busy times, when are your quietest times. This might be months of the year (for example if you sell roof replacements, winter might be quiet). If you run a restaurant Mondays might be quiet. Whether it’s a time, a day or a period, it doesn’t matter, the point is that you can run ads to help reverse this. For example:

If Monday evenings are slow, run a promotional ad with a discount

If it’s winter, change your remarketing ads so that anyone who has seen your site during the year can consider your winter specials. Schedule changes to maximize the benefits to your business at the times it needs it most.

Second, think events

Whether you sell cleaning services or dental implants, it doesn’t matter, promotions tied to events work. So think, mother’s day, spring break, Valentines, Halloween. The event itself doesn’t matter, just come up with a link to your offer, however tenuous, and run special promotional ads to a special promotional page on your website.

Use customizers in your ads to count down days till your promotions close and the extra urgency will get users hurrying to do business with you.

Third, think seasonality

It’s important you compare your ads to your competitors. Analyze every aspect from your offer to theirs, your tone of voice to theirs, position on the page, and so on. If you don’t see much of a difference, nor will your potential prospects, so step back and think of a unique place in your market that you could occupy to stand out from the crowd.

It might be a better offer, a better guarantee, better testimonials or best of all, all of these. Whatever you can do, just make sure you stand out.

If this all seems too much for you, contact us and we’ll discuss your needs to work out a plan that’s right for you.

Social media optimization is a marketing strategy that’s simply too important to ignore. Social networks are growing steadily and they are providing small businesses an opportunity to reach out to a bigger audience. In today’s online world, you would need to be thriving socially if you want your business to get more customers and crush your competition. Not convinced with the power of social media? See our Infographic:

Amplification: Beyond Reach, Engagement

Social media is an effective tool for reaching your prospects and engaging them. According to Pew Internet research, 67% of all Internet users also use social networks. Meanwhile, comScore estimates that one in six minutes spent online is on social networks. These statistics simply mean that when people are online, they also connect via social media—giving business owners and marketers an opportunity for customer reach and engagement. But what makes social media powerful is amplification. The more engaged your friends and followers are, the bigger your amplification factor grows. This is turn results in more reach, deeper engagement, and again, bigger amplification. The social cycle goes on and on, and is similar to the buying cycle: awareness, interest, desire, action, loyalty, and advocacy. Amplification, however, makes the difference as it broadcasts the advocacy to a bigger audience, amplifying the number of leads and customers you can reach and engage.

Facebook Leads Social Network Growth

More and more social networks are being created nowadays but some of the crucial ones businesses need to focus on are as follows: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. These are networks that have shown steady growth. These are where most of your prospects share and connect with friends. Facebook, in particular, should be a business necessity. The social network now has 1.11 billion monthly active users, up from 680 million in 2011. Its mobile user base is around 751 million, surging 62% from only 288 million two years ago. A study by HubSpot showed that 74% of all marketers consider Facebook as important in their lead generation efforts. Other social networks are also growing:

LinkedIn has 200 million users, adding 2 new signups per second

Twitter has 288 million MAUs making 1.6 billion queries per day

Google+ MAU base is currently at 359 million, making it the second biggest network

Pinterest growth skyrocketed 88% over the past 12 months

Get Customers, Sales from Social

Their user base growth may be impressive but can social networks help your business grow? The answer: YES. In fact, customer acquisition through social networks has been increasing. In 2012, 62% of businesses using LinkedIn said they acquired a customer through the world’s largest professional network. This is up from 57% in 2011. Customer acquisition through Facebook and Twitter also went up from 48% to 52% and 42% to 44%, respectively. You attract prospects for sure, but do they buy? A study by Nielsen found that 46% of online users depend on social media when making a purchase decision. In a separate report, VisionCritical said 38% of Facebook users have purchased an item after liking or sharing it. Pinterest (29%) and Twitter (22%) also bought an item after conducting some social action involving that product. To get more sales, you need to adjust your approach on the online social realm. The same VisionCritical research recommended that businesses tweak their social content based on the culture of the users within a specific network. They also need to take into consideration the category that content would likely fall under. To make social work, you need to reach and engage your audience with custom content that is in line with the category of your business, as well as with the culture of your prospects.

The Market Leaders and Your Competitors Are Social… Are You?

Market leaders are using social media. For instance, 90% of Inc. 500 companies use at least one major social media platform, according to marketing speaker Heidi Cohen. Majority of marketers (83%) also understand how powerful social is, Social Media Examiner found. Some 59% of marketers use social media for six or more hours a week. Your competitors are conducting some form of social media optimization today, too. E-Strategy Trends found that an overwhelming 92% of small businesses consider social media as an effective marketing tool. Meanwhile, eMarketer found that 21% of small businesses plan to spend more on social media advertising this year. So now, you know market leaders are social online. Your competitors are likely going social, too. They are realizing the power of online social networks and how these can help them acquire more customers and get more sales. In short, they know that social media is essential to business success today. But you know that, too. So what are you going to do? Send us an email or call us at 424-888-0291 now to schedule your free in-depth consultation with us. We can help your business succeed with the power of social media optimization.

Social media optimization is a known business necessity. Owners understand that for their venture to withstand the competition and survive in the current economic environment, they need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. They need to update fan pages, upload photos, and interact with their audience. After all, 67% of all Internet users use social networks, according to Pew Internet research. Indeed no online marketing strategy is ever complete without it. But at the end of the day, its sales—not likes, retweets, or repins—that keep the business going. So the question now is…

“Do businesses actually get sales from social media?”

Social: Vast Network of Networks

Despite doubts clouding social’s power to keep the cash register ringing, business still believe in conducting marketing via social networks. In fact, 83% of marketers surveyed by Social Media Examiner consider social media as important for their business. The same source found that 59% or marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week.

As for which site is considered most critical to business, 42% of marketers asked by HubSpot for the State of Inbound Marketing report voted Facebook as their choice. Some 80% of U.S. social network users prefer to connect to brands through it.

Apart from Facebook, which now has 1.11 billion monthly active users, Twitter and Pinterest were also cited by marketers. According to a study by Edison Research, 51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands, or products on social networks. Pinterest, on the other hand, is ranked by Experian as the third most popular social network in the U.S., based on traffic. Google’s very own Google+ is continuously growing with 235 million monthly active users. Then, there’s YouTube, LinkedIn, and other popular sites.

So, Do Social Users Actually Buy?

Some 43% of social users actually do buy. The purchases happened after conducting some form of social action on the item, like sharing and favoriting, says global research provider Vision Critical. Broken down by site, Facebook appears to be the best platform to drive sales as 38% of its users have purchased an item after liking and sharing it. Pinterest ranks second with 29% of users saying they have purchased an item. Twitter was third with 22%. Social sites can drive both online and offline sales, it was found.

What do they buy? Recent social-inspired purchases by users fall mostly under technology and electronics, with the category accounting for 34% of sales driven by Twitter and 25% by Facebook. As for Pinterest, the top category was food and drink (24%).

Which type of retail store or site did they buy from? Facebook users mostly purchased from a discount retailer (43%) and supermarket (18%). Discount retailer also ranked first for Twitter (31%) and Pinterest (26%). Twitter users also bought from a department store (31%) while Pinterest users purchased from a specialty retailer (21%).

The Social Buyer: Dissected & Analyzed

The social buyer exists, and is mostly (51%) between the age of 18 and 34. The 35-54 age group represents 34% of social purchasers while the 55+ age group accounts for the remaining 15% or so. Divided by sex, 56% are male and 44% are female.

The demographics change when mobile comes into the picture. The ratio between males and females further favors males, 69:31. The 18-34 age group grows to 68% of the total number of social purchasers using mobile. Facebook (43%) and Pinterest (38%) purchases are mostly not mobile but 35% of Twitter-driven purchases are purely mobile.

So what’s inside the mind of a social buyer? A whopping 70% of Twitter user-purchasers said they were “vaguely” thinking about purchasing the product at the time they bought it. Facebook (60%) and Pinterest (49%) users had the same mindset when they bought a product, adds Vision Critical. The difference surfaces in buyers who “had not thought about purchasing this product” when they bought it. Only 9% of Twitter user-purchasers fall under this group while the figure is 16% for Facebook. Pinterest appears to be the best site for unplanned purchases as 29% their social buyers weren’t even thinking about buying such item when purchased it.

How to Appeal to Your Social Buyer

Use a Specific Network’s Purchasing Influence – Auto posting the same exact stuff on all your social accounts is not the best way to approach social media. If you want to get social-inspired sales, you must understand how a particular network or social website influences a customer’s purchase decision. For example, 43% of Pinterest purchasers said they were influenced by the “additional information on the product,” according to Vision Critical. This means Pinterest is a great choice when providing product details, reviews and recommendations, different models, etc.

For identifying where prospects can purchase the product, 38% of buyers used Twitter. When alerting to a sale or deal, 37% credited Facebook and 32% Twitter. Some 32% got reminders to purchase through Twitter. But when it comes to providing a coupon code, the battle is tight among Facebook (18%), Pinterest (14%), and Twitter (18%). Product discovery contest is also close: Facebook (31%), Pinterest (35%), and Twitter (35%).

Network Where Your Targets Are – Leading data firm comScore estimates 80% of Pinterest users are female. Repinly, an online pin directory, says the most popular Pinterest categories are as follows: food & drink, DIY and crafts, women’s apparel, and home décor. Head over to Google+ and the world turns upside down. According to SocialStatistics, nearly 87% of Google+ users are male. Students, early adopters, and engineers are some of the biggest groups. Go to LinkedIn and you’ll find a healthy balance of professionals from both sexes.
The idea is to analyze which site best suits your target market’s profile and then start your social media optimization campaign in that network. This strategy not only gives your marketing direction some focus, it also maximizes your resources.

Get Started in Focused Social Media Today – You can use social media optimization not just to get a legion of followers, but also to generate sales. That’s already proven. The best approach right now is to get started—if you haven’t already—and give it focus to ensure you influence social buyers to purchase your products and avail of your services today. We can help you.

Send us an email at sales@prowebteam.com or call us at 424-888-0291 now so we can provide you free in-depth consultation on social media optimization, and how you can attract social purchasers, better understand your customer, and generate more sales from social networks today.

Did you know that within the social media space, there are conversations happening at this very moment that will define your brand? If you don’t capitalize on this vast and growing landscape, your competitors will, and you won’t like the outcome.

Watch the video:

Business owners may not realize it yet but social media optimization is now a crucial marketing necessity if their venture is to compete in this economy. The emergence of social networks over the past few years has changed the way businesses reach out to their audience. In fact, it is no longer enough to have a website, get backlinks, and rank well on Google. Today, a successful business needs essential elements: networking, awareness, engagement, trust, and loyalty – all of which are achievable through social media.

Social Media Optimization: A Legitimate Business Need

You might still be wondering, just how important is having a Social Media Optimization campaign for your business. Well, let us help you put things in perspective.

It took 13 years for television to reach an audience of 50 million people (United Nations Cyberschoolbus)

It only took Facebook 2 years!

Without a solid social media optimization strategy, it will be difficult for businesses to make the most out of this trend. Even coping with it will be a struggle. Social media is indeed growing and evolving fast. It’s involving more and more people connecting with each other, sharing thoughts and feelings through status messages, likes, tweets, links, photos, videos, and etc.

How connected are you to your target audience? How many people are talking about your business? When a potential customer searches for your business’ name on Google, are they going to find (aside from your website) professionally designed and updated social media profiles?

Social Networks as Marketing Tools

In the “State of the Media: Social Media Report,” global information and measurement company Nielsen reported that social media has changed how consumers are influenced to buy. “Consumer decisions and behaviors are increasingly driven by the opinions, tastes, and preferences of an exponentially larger, global pool of friends, peers, and influencers,” the report said.

The Nielsen study also found that, each month, social media users:

Read about other customer experiences (70%)

Learn more about business products and services (65%)

Compliment brands (53%)

Express how they feel about brands they like or don’t like (50%)

This is both a challenge and a cause for celebration for marketers. While it will be more difficult to control brand messaging, it also opens up new channels for business owners to reach their prospects. If you have a social networking strategy, you can influence how prospects see your brand, and eventually gain their awareness, engagement, trust, and loyalty.

How to Take Advantage of Social

From account setup to maintenance and tracking, there’s a plethora of actions that can benefit the online social presence of your business. Some of the more important actions you can take, and take immediately if possible, are as follows:

Share Updates via Facebook – If you’re going to inform people of your events, updates, and promotions, make sure to include Facebook in the plan. The biggest of them all, the world’s largest social network now has 1.11 billion monthly active users.

Share Updates via Google Plus – Google’s own social network now has 500 million registered members, 359 million of which are active. Apart from its usual social properties, Google+ is crucial for marketing because of its SEO or search engine optimization benefits. A recent correlation study by Internet marketing software developer Moz found that high ranking pages tend to have more +1’s.

Tweet Regularly – Establish your presence by posting regular updates on the micro-blogging site. MediaBistro estimates that 67% of Twitter users are far more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter. Twitter’s own survey shows that 63% of people follow SMBs to show their support. Some 85% “feel more connected” to the business after following them.

Join LinkedIn Discussions – LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with 238 million members. It’s a great way to build your credibility and gain customer trust. Feel free to join relevant discussions in over 2.1 million LinkedIn groups.

Create Hype through YouTube – YouTube needs no introduction but to get a glimpse of its power as a web traffic source and social platform, here are some interesting figures. Over 1 billion unique visitors use it every month. Nielsen reports that YouTube has a better reach than any cable network when it comes to the 18-34 U.S. age group. Video is an exciting format and YouTube enables you to take advantage of it.

Social Media Optimization Benefits

The problem with networking through social media is the time and dedication needed to ensure you have a regular presence. Your followers need to see constant updates on your accounts. Unfortunately, business owners cannot afford to spend all their time away from the core business posting status updates or commenting on discussions. Good thing we can help you in this area. It is, after all, our expertise.

We can draft a social media strategy that can help you achieve your business goals, and then help you execute the plan… so you can remain focused on your core operations, and push the business from that end.
We’re offering free in-depth consultation on how social media optimization can help grow your business today. Send us an email at sales@prowebteam.com or call us at 424-888-0291 now to schedule your free consultation today.

Getting More Leads and Sales, Not Just Fancy Cosmetic Redesign

Implementing responsive web design means opening up your online storefront to mobile visitors, effectively increasing your chances of getting more leads and sales through your site. While it may come as a mere fancy redesign to some business owners, you should realize that this change is geared toward marketing more than cosmetics. Making the decision to have a responsive site means giving your business more opportunities to grow, especially for the long haul. (more…)

Many business owners today tend to ignore the importance of having a mobile friendly or “responsive” website. Without realizing it, they may be losing prospective leads and sales because their website is not designed to load properly on mobile devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Here’s why you should not be one of them, and how you can make your website responsive:

Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p0Mh4G3l38

What is Mobile Responsive Web Design?
Your website needs to be mobile friendly, so it needs to be “mobile responsive.” Responsive design is when your website automatically responds or adjusts on the fly to the screen size of the device viewing it. In effect, be it a desktop, a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, your website will load properly.

Users Favor Mobile Friendly Sites
According to a study commissioned by Google, 74% of users are more likely to return to a mobile-friendly site. But that’s not all. Some 67% of users are more likely to buy if the site is mobile friendly. On the other hand, if your website is not friendly to mobile viewers, you could be in trouble. On the same study, it was found that 48% of users are “frustrated” and “annoyed” by a non-mobile-friendly website. Some 48% said a company “doesn’t care” about its business if its site is not mobile friendly. Some 52% of users are unlikely to engage with a business that has a non-mobile-friendly site.

More Mobile Devices Connected Online
You need a responsive site as more and more people are using mobile devices to browse online. First of all, ABI Research estimates that there will be 1.4 billion smartphones by the end of 2013. With the current population at 7 billion, that’s 1 smartphone for every 5 people. Meanwhile, comScore estimates that 28% of smartphone owners also own a tablet. Needless to say, mobile device ownership is up and will continue to rise in the future.

More and more people are also using these devices to connect to the Internet. Digital research firm, comScore estimates that 1 in every 3minutes spent on digital media is now driven by mobile views. The same company forecasts that by 2014, there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop users.

How We Can Help You
If your website is not mobile friendly, you won’t be able to take advantage of these trends. Worse, your customers will be looking to your competitors for the products and services you can provide. And all of this is because they bounced off your “frustrating” non-responsive website.

Whether they be mobile or desktop users, we’re here to help you attract those visitors, so you can turn them into leads and sales and dominate your competition. How?

Responsive Website Design
We’ll create a mobile responsive website for your business that automatically adjusts to the screen size of your viewers, allowing it to load perfectly on all devices: desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Your visitors won’t have to scroll up and down and zoom in and out all the time, leading to a great user experience. And because mobile users will soon outnumber desktop users soon, you’re investing in technology that’s here to stay. This is the last website you’ll need!

Custom Design
We’ll provide you with web design mockups and source relevant images that will reflect your brand and your business. You can also choose from our ready-made professional website themes.

Content-Driven CMS
We’ll install a WordPress content management system on your responsive site. This CMS has a simple interface so you can effortlessly upload company updates, photos, and other content.

Onsite Blog
We’ll also set up your onsite blog so you can reach out to your prospects and tell them about your products, services, and promotions. This will also help improve your business reputation and your online search rankings.

Other Web Design Services
Apart from responsive web design, we can also do a number of other website-related services for you, such as:

Email Installation and Configuration – We will install your Google business email using the domain name of your website. Each of the 10 users will have access to Google Mail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

Contact Forms – Don’t just settle for visits, convert your traffic to leads. We will install a fully functional basic contact form on your website so you can capture your visitors information like their name and email address. You can then use that information to qualify your target market and send them offers.

Website Backup, Migration, Installation – If something happens to your live website, you can easily restore it using the backup data. Data backups will offer benefits for you if you want to effectively store multiple copies of web-based data in a secure location. For migration, we will transfer all your integral website files to a new reliable host.

Get Free In-Depth Consultation
We’d like to know more about how we can help you. That’s why we offer our web design clients free in-depth consultations. Unlike other web design service providers, we sit down with our clients and discuss what their business is and who their targets are. We believe it’s important to understand how your business works so we’ll know exactly how to help you using our responsive web design services.

So go ahead and send us an email at sales@prowebteam.com or give us a call now at 424-888-0291 to learn more about how we can help you grow your customers and your business today.

“Our experts will review every aspect of your Adwords campaign to find wasted spend and missed opportunities. Our fully Google accredited team has tested over 1.4 million ad clicks in the last year, so you can be sure that our analysis of your campaign will find your lost money.”